Not only was Vernon's Leah Goldstein the first to cross the finish line at the gruelling 2025 Trans Am Nonstop Bike Race, she was the fastest to ever complete the 6,500-kilometre route, male or female.
Not bad for a 56-year-old woman taking on the longest self-supported endurance cycling race in the world.
Goldstein set a new Trans Am record by finishing in 15 days and six hours. After pedalling almost non-stop across the U.S. for more than two weeks, she finished more than 1,200 kilometres ahead of the second-place finisher.
"I think I had one of the races of my life," Goldstein told The Morning Star Wednesday morning after a couple hours sleep, her body still in race-mode after she finished the feat on Monday. "Everything just went my way."
Everything most certainly did not go her way when she first took on the Trans Am last year. It was her first time entering a self-supported race, a type of race that prohibits support teams, leaving racers entirely on their own to navigate the route and perform their own bike maintenance.
All that came with a steep learning curve last year, when Goldstein had to repair a dozen tire punctures, deal with a cracked wheel, fend off dogs in the wild west state of Kentucky, and overcome navigational and mechanical issues that slowed her to a behind two men whose combined age was still less than hers.
This year was different. Goldstein was equipped with puncture-proof tubeless tires. Her bike was fine-tuned and beefed-up by her mechanic. She'd studied every inch of the route ahead of time (and made a plan to bypass Kentucky and its wild dogs). She knew what she needed to pack and what would unnecessarily weigh her down. And she had reached a "new level of fitness" from her training this year.
All those improvements set her up for a historic performance.
Goldstein set a lofty goal of finishing in 14 days, a feat she very nearly accomplished.
One thing that helped her to a faster time was a willingness to sleep outside.
"I was on the lookout too much for a motel or something," she said of last year's race, adding this time she slept in churches, in ditches and on concrete.
"No luxury here. If you want to win the race it's wherever," she said of her sleep routines.
She rode the first 45 hours without any sleep at all and only got a couple hours sleep at most each night thereafter. Sometimes it was too cold to sleep and she would instead ride on, letting her exertion warm her body.
All the way she battled the elements, none more treacherous than the torrential downpours she endured in the final three days of her race.
"When I say rain, it was like pouring buckets of rain," she said. "All my devices got waterlogged, my phone got water inside of it so nothing was working, it was hard to see the road, and so it slows you down."
On one sleepless rainy night she came across a Mennonite church.
"I went, 'Oh my God, I have to convert.' I was so happy to see it," she said.
More than just a physical test, Goldstein said the Trans Am is a mental feat.
"Maybe its 65 per cent physical, the rest is all mental," she said.
The Trans Am took riders from Astoria, Oregon, to Yorktown, Virginia. Roughly 40 cyclists took part this year. Some will finish the race a week from now while Goldstein's body recovers during some well-earned time off the bike.
She'll be back on the bike before too long, though, training for the HooDoo 500 in August (a race she won last year), and the Pacific Coast Bike Race in September.
